Case Notes Transcription & Summarisation Tool

Essex County Council (ECC) is seeking to explore how artificial intelligence can support Adult Social Care practice by transcribing and summarising practitioner and resident conversations. The work forms part of ECC's wider Pioneering AI programme, established to identify safe, ethical, and effective use of AI across the organisation. ECC has previously undertaken a proof of concept for this requirement that responded to significant pressures within Adult Social Care, including rising demand, workforce shortages, increasing case complexity, and a high administrative burden associated with recording case notes, which reduces time available for direct work with residents.

Wider Roll Out Project: A pilot has been undertaken as part of ECC's AI Transcription and Summarisation Proof of Concept to test the use of AI tools in supporting Adult Social Care practice by transcribing and summarising practitioner conversations. At this point, ECC aims through potential future procurement and strategic decision making to scale this capability across Adult Social Care, selecting an appropriate mix of specialist tools and Microsoft capabilities, to deliver improved efficiency, consistent high quality case recording, and sustainable, compliant AI adoption at scale.

The objective of this market engagement survey is to inform any future procurement process and assess if this market is viable, understanding whether AI tools and capabilities can reduce recording time, improve the quality and consistency of case notes, enhance practitioner and resident experience, and provide a clear evidence base and governance model for scaling AI safely and responsibly within high-risk statutory social care contexts.

The following requirements are necessary:

1. Transcription Capability: The solution must support the accurate capture and transcription of conversations across a range of operational settings. This market engagement survey seeks to answer what transcription accuracy levels can be achieved; how the tool handles multiple speakers, overlapping conversations, accents, background noise, telephone calls and whether there is functionality for diverse language support.
2. AI summarisation Capability: The solution must generate structured summaries from conversations to support operational case recording and decision-making. This market engagement survey seeks to answer how summaries are generated; if summary outputs can be configured to align with service specific templates; how the tool would minimise/eliminate omissions of critical information and if outputs can be customised for different business processes and service areas.
3. Human oversight and quality assurance: The solution must support human review and validation of AI-generated outputs. This market engagement survey seeks to answer how users can review, edit and approve outputs; how the tool would support correction of errors; how changes can be applied across transcripts and summaries and the quality assurance mechanisms.
4. Security, privacy and information governance: The solution must satisfy public sector requirements for handling sensitive personal information. This market engagement survey seeks to answer how customer data is stored and processed, whether UK data residency is available, what certifications are held (ISO27001, Cyber Essentials Plus etc.), how is data encrypted in transit and at rest and also how is access controlled and monitored and how the solution supports GDPR compliance.
5. Auditability, transparency and responsible AI: The solution must be able to monitor usage and consumption by User Groups and dates, providing transparency, traceability and governance controls appropriate for high-risk public sector use cases. This market engagement survey seeks to answer what audit trails are available, how all user actions, AI outputs and changes can be logged as well as what mechanisms exist for monitoring biases, fairness and accuracy and how the tool supports challenge, redress and investigation.
6. Accessibility and Inclusion: The solution must be accessible to a diverse workforce and service user population. This market engagement survey seeks to answer if the tool would meet inclusion and accessibility standards, what accessibility features are available, how the tool may support neurodiverse users and if the solution would support screen readers and voice inputs.
7. Integration and interoperability: The solution must integrate with existing and future ECC technology environments. This Market Engagement Survey seeks to answer what integrations are currently available and if the summaries can be exported or copied into third party systems. Additionally, we are seeking to understand if APIs are available and if the tool can integrate with M365, Teams, case management systems and other telephony platforms.
8. Operational resilience and reliability: The solution must be reliable in both office-based and community-based settings including device compatibility and the ability to use own devices. This Market Engagement Survey seeks to answer what service availability levels are provided, what disaster recovery arrangements exist, how the tool handles interrupted recordings and what support exists for offline working and low bandwidth environments.
9. Scalability and enterprise adoption: The solution must support deployment across multiple services and large user populations. This market engagement survey seeks to answer how the tool scales, how user onboarding, training and support are delivered as well as what usage analytic and adoption metrics are available.
10. Commercial model and total cost of ownership: ECC requires a sustainable and transparent commercial model to meet our requirements. This market engagement survey seeks to answer what pricing model is used (license, usage, consumption, transaction or hybrid), what the structure of implementation and ongoing support is and if there are any constraints on users, recordings or storage.